The political death of Helmut Kohl has been prematurely predicted so many times during his 15 years in office that the Chancellor is said to cherish a collection of newspaper headlines and magazine covers announcing his imminent departure.
But as he looks back at a disastrous year for his centre-right government and forward to a federal election in September, even Dr Kohl must doubt the firmness of his own grip on power.
The Chancellor is notoriously uninterested in economic affairs, except insofar as they affect his beloved project of European unity. But in 1997, when German unemployment passed four million to reach a level not seen since Hitler came to power, the country's economic problems became too dramatic to be ignored.
As firms fled to Eastern Europe, Asia and South America in search of cheap labour, Dr Kohl promised to turn the tide by reforming Germany's unwieldy and punitive tax system. But squabbles inside his own government combined with opposition stubbornness to kill off the reform plan, leaving the Chancellor looking more ineffectual than ever.
If these problems were not enough, Dr Kohl piled further misery on the German economy by attempting to squeeze it into the strict financial corset of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The effort to keep Germany's public deficit below the limit laid down for entry to EMU forced the Chancellor and his Finance Minister, Theo Waigel, into the most undignified contortions - including a shoddy attempt to revalue the Bundesbank gold reserves.
Dr Kohl and Mr Waigel later stepped back from the gold revaluation stratagem - but not before they had damaged Germany's hard-won reputation for financial probity and confirmed their own incompetence as stewards of the economy.
An air of stagnation hangs over German life and, although most experts agree on what the country needs to become economically fit again, the politicians appear incapable of setting the process in motion.
The election year will begin in earnest on March 1st, when the Social Democrats' economic spokesman, Gerhard Schroder, faces the voters in his home state of Lower Saxony. Mr Schroder makes no secret of his ambition to become chancellor in September but, in a characteristically audacious gesture, has vowed to shelve his national ambitions if his vote in Lower Saxony falls by more than 2 per cent.
Strictly speaking, the Social Democrats' chairman, Oskar Lafontaine, ought to be his party's automatic choice to face Dr Kohl. A gifted orator and a witty parliamentary performer, Mr Lafontaine has been spectacularly successful in uniting his party and preparing it to fight the election as a disciplined force.
Social Democrat activists love his passionate calls for social justice and his commitment to traditional left-wing values. But he is less popular among uncommitted voters and was roundly defeated by Dr Kohl in the federal election that followed German reunification in 1990.
Mr Schroder is often compared to Britain's Tony Blair, on account of his appeal to conservative voters and his willingness to abandon traditional party pieties. A director of Volkswagen, he is close to business and presents himself as a pragmatist with little time for ideology.
Like the last Social Democratic chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, he is disliked by the left wing of his party but his vote-winning appeal may be so great that they will back him as their best hope of regaining power in Bonn.
According to opinion polls, Mr Schroder is more popular than Dr Kohl and would easily defeat the Chancellor in a presidential contest. But neither the Social Democrats nor the Christian Democrats can expect to win an overall majority, so the performance of their potential coalition partners will be crucial.
The good news for the Social Democrats is that the Greens, with whom they already share power in a number of states, have been polling above 10 per cent throughout 1997. On the face of it, this makes it almost impossible for Dr Kohl to hold on to power, even if his bad-tempered coalition partners, the liberal Free Democrats, succeed in winning the 5 per cent of votes they need to stay in parliament.
But the Social Democrats are almost as gifted at losing elections as Dr Kohl is at winning them, so a change of government is not a certainty.
The signs are, however, that the economic cycle will not be as kind to the Chancellor as it was in previous election years. Although the economy is growing, unemployment is still rising and is expected to reach five million during the first few weeks of the year.
The arrival of the euro will make little difference to Germany's general economic picture and, although Mr Schroder is something of a Eurosceptic, the single currency is unlikely to be an election issue. The euro is now clearly unstoppable and, although most Germans would prefer to keep the mark, they are resigned to the change.
A change of government in Germany could have profound repercussions for Europe as a whole, especially if Mr Schroder becomes chancellor. He wants Bonn to abandon its leadership role within the European Union and to defend German national interests more candidly.
Unlike Dr Kohl, Mr Schroder has little sentimental attachment to the European idea and is unlikely to dominate EU summits in the manner of the present chancellor.
If Dr Kohl finally loses power in September, Europe will lose its towering political figure. But, after the tributes are paid and the shock of his defeat fades away, Europe, like Germany, may conclude that this was a good, necessary man whose time has passed.